How useful is a computer without a mouse? Pretty useless, wouldn’t you agree? In a pinch, you can use the Tab and Enter keys, but it is not always easy to tell where the Tab has moved to, if it has moved at all.

Due to having C.P., I can’t use a standard mouse. I just don’t have the fine motor skills it takes to operate a mouse. I have had an adapted mouse\joystick that has well placed function buttons under a grid to prevent me from hitting a command I don’t want to make. I had two such joysticks. One for home use, and the other for work. As it turns out, both joysticks stopped working the same week. What are the odds of that happening?

I suspected the joystick at home was on it’s way out. In preparation, I went to Best Buy, and bought the only thing I thought might halfway work. A wireless Trackball, an upside down mouse, if you can picture that. I knew it wasn’t exactly what I needed, and that it would cause me loads of frustrations, because the buttons were too close together. However, for a quick fix, I told myself I could make it work!

I played a lot of solitaire, just to practice using the Trackball. Strangely enough, I discovered I could control the Trackball better if it was turned around, so that the mouse moves in the opposite direction that it usually goes in. By using it this way, I’m less likely to press unwanted keys. Within a couple of weeks I was pretty pleased with how well I was using the trackball; I was actually winning some games! However, when I tried to do some finite work, using the trackball became the most amazingly frustrating chore ever! I would get the mouse exactly where I wanted it, only I couldn’t depress the right click, or I’d get so excited that I found the mark, that a wayward finger would brush against the ball and send the mouse clear across the screen.

I have a vivid fantasy of picking up the trackball, and flinging it out of my room, down the hallway, and running it over and over and over again until it is crushed into millions of tiny pieces! Fortunately, for the trackball, it is shaped so irregularly that I can’t get a good grasp on it to throw it. Even if I did manage to throw the trackball, my new power chair would merely push it around until the wheel found a way to skirt past it! Anyway, crushing the trackball would do no good service to myself. However, the act of describing my fantasy got out my frustrations! Ah, the power of writing!